Who am I, this mystery before me, both below and outward, both inside and beneath reason?

Who am I, this single dancer in a circus line of creatures mistaken as self, whilst all about this singular is nowhere?

Who am I, this bewildered child screaming out of the darkness, whilst light is everywhere, immersing my doubt in the seeded-bed of nutriment.

Am I but my shadow, the edges of me formed by the objective angle, by the instrumental being of sun at play with madness?

Am I but marionette set to strings or the more: this twisted master puppeteer snarling and snapping from up above, laughing at the ownership of chance?

Am I the singer tethered inside shell, severed voice blocked and thusly returned by thine own harbored walls?

Am I this rice, this grain, this planted web, tangled beneath the soil of enrichment, begging within a beating substance to escape the depths from where breath labors?

Am I a blinded legless one, slithering through the streets of reason, slipping through skin in regeneration, hoping passerby will collect the shed of what’s been?

Am I the monk with cymbals, clanging-metal-smile-creator, discontented-sorrow-seeker placating the rebel masses, born into appeasement?

Am I the voice without time, the rhythm without cause, the ocean without water, the mountain without foundation? Am I merely floating in a nonsensical nonexistence, wading and wavering through that which is naught and cannot be found?

Am I dropped here, a foreigner, with all the ripened senses plucked out of me, so I may spend eternity searching for the one I once was?

Helpless at my very seams, I am.

The most of all not mended, not fixed, not finished, left to wander with the stuffing jumping outside into teasing freedom, my insides deserting captain, torn empty, this incomplete form.

I am this.

I am this universal measure in incompletion, steadying myself on untrained legs in an untrained world. Jumping through hoops that neither exist or appear, but manage to bruise the very essence from where I gather semblance and substance and order.

Hollowed I am, in the shape of the corner of the mind, bleached by the external force of unknown, blanched and then blanketed in a knowing of unknowing, taught of the presence of presence, and moment within moment, but then tortured by the possibilities that endlessly speak of nowhere.

I am this vulture starved of the carrion, starved of the self, starved of what would be me inside the mirror, if image appeared. And yet I am meant to be in some way here, as if here was evermore spoken.

And thusly I clamber and shake, my own boots too big for the climbing, my own answers too heavy to be held in the limited chambers of thought’s engine.

And I trumpet, one part bleeding out to the other parts, to prove a lingering hypothesis of ever expansion. Until the weariness speaks louder than the want. Until release beckons like the child’s grave that speaks out to broken mother. Unbendable matters beckoning forth from somewhere bleak but lacking bleakness, formed of unspoken words and erased images that never were.

Here is where the artist’s invisible and imagined heart is purged, here in the incremental sewing of the energetic threads of the absence of self.

Here I exist: as the pudding poured out from the sharpening of nothing.

~~~
Samantha Craft, January 2013